As a contrary data-point, I'm an increasingly luddite programmer who doesn't care at all about 5G, but I live in a town that is kind of a hotbed for conspiracy stuff and I tire of the latest scare always going round without a plausible causal mechanism.
You can find PHDs who believe just about anything (I saw one recently with a sign saying "sunspots cause global warming"), and PHDs publish papers. So you have to look at whether they were peer reviewed, in what journal, and what the findings and methods really were.
It's a lot of work to properly evaluate studies, but I think that meta-analysis is easily abused in this arena. The other big problem is the null publication bias. Have one hundred people roll dice, and if you're only interested in snake-eyes and only publish papers on where that happens, you'll get like 9 studies where they rolled snake-eyes and one responsible scientist who publishes a null result, and conclude that there's a 90% chance of snake-eyes on dice rolls...
You can find PHDs who believe just about anything (I saw one recently with a sign saying "sunspots cause global warming"), and PHDs publish papers. So you have to look at whether they were peer reviewed, in what journal, and what the findings and methods really were.
It's a lot of work to properly evaluate studies, but I think that meta-analysis is easily abused in this arena. The other big problem is the null publication bias. Have one hundred people roll dice, and if you're only interested in snake-eyes and only publish papers on where that happens, you'll get like 9 studies where they rolled snake-eyes and one responsible scientist who publishes a null result, and conclude that there's a 90% chance of snake-eyes on dice rolls...